


Cautionary Tales

by JDP31



Category: The Miseducation of Cameron Post - Emily M. Danforth
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-24
Updated: 2017-01-24
Packaged: 2018-09-19 17:11:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9451751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JDP31/pseuds/JDP31
Summary: This is a first chapter of a (hopefully) multi-chapter work. It focuses on Coley Taylor several years after her relationship with Cameron. She is living in Miles City and married with an infant when she finds out that Grandma Post died and imagines a reunion with Cameron.





	

Coley Taylor tiptoed onto the porch and into the cool, hazy morning. Though she juggled a musty afghan, a baby monitor and, guiltily, a pack of cigarettes, she still managed to catch the screen door in time to prevent the loud clang that would have woken the baby, ending her time to herself before it began. She relaxed into the rocking chair, which seemed lonesome on the expansive porch of the house she and Brett had bought six months ago, threading the needle as they rushed to move in after the ranch had sold but before the baby came. 

They had packed hastily. Things had been thrown from attics and basements into boxes and then into the backs of pickup trucks. Kitchenware shared box space with books and picture frames. Bed linen sets were separated and employed to safeguard frames and glasses. During that strange, first night she and Brett had slept in their new house, thoughts of the utter chaos that lurked inside those boxes was enough to keep Coley awake, even without the incessant urge to pee and the breathlessness of sleeping with such a weight in her belly. After her fourth walk across the cold, creaky floorboards to the bathroom, Coley decided to just stay up. 

She had wandered among the empty rooms, surveying the battered boxes and wondering how it would all ever fit together. Coley liked when things fit together. She had spent hours as a kid building her brother’s untouched Lego sets. When she got older, she’d spent afternoons designing systems to organize her Dad’s tools and her Mom’s shoes. Around the time her father died, odd numbers started to make her feel uncomfortable, helpless almost - like if she had to make things fit, she wouldn’t be able to. To this day, if she wakes up in the middle of the night to see an uneven number radiating into the darkness from her alarm clock, she stares at it until it the minute changes. It is only then, when order has been restored, however briefly, that she is able to close her eyes again.

The red pine floors were cool under her bare feet but with each step they groaned an unwelcome reminder of her heaviness into the pin-drop quiet. Entering what would become their living room, she spotted a razor sitting on top of a stack of boxes, its blade peaking out from the hard, gray shell. She picked it up, meaning to put it back in its right place but quickly realized that she didn’t know where that would be. So, she pierced the packing tape of the box at the top of the stack, ran the razor along the length of the flaps, hearing it whisper and then pop as it came out the other end. 

Coley settled on the floor, the open box in front of her. She considered each of its inhabitants carefully in the dim light before placing them in haphazard piles around the circumference of her crossed-legged, rotund body. By the time she could see the bottom of the third box and was reaching for the fourth, the piles around her had multiplied and taken on categorical nuance and specificity. She continued like that until the morning light streamed unfettered through the windows. All throughout that breezeless Montana night, Coley had seen to the intermingling of their disparate things with an energy and focus that astounds her when she looks back on it now and that may have been fueled by some prescient knowledge that her water would break less than 48 hours later.

A week or so later, when family and friends came over to meet the baby, they all commented on how quickly Coley and Brett had managed to get settled in the new house. In these moments, Coley’s mind inevitably flashed upon the things she hadn’t gotten to that night, the odds and ends that still lurked, disarrayed in the basement or spare room - always out of view but never far from her mind.

Looking back on it now, through the fog of the many sleepless nights that followed, Coley marveled most at the absolute absorption she’d felt in the task. These days, she couldn’t seem to manage to pour her coffee and add both sugar and cream in a string of contiguous actions without being pulled away to tend to a crying baby, to hush the dog or to help Brett find his keys so he could get out the door. By the time she got back to her coffee, it had usually gone cold and she had to start all over. 

Now, as she peered into the pack of half-empty pack of mostly stale cigarettes, Coley vowed to smoke one all the way through, even if the baby cried. It had taken a while, but she was learning to take advantage of these quiet moments. Mostly, she had to steal them: taking the long way home from the grocery store and claiming traffic, pretending to sleep through the baby’s cries at night and letting Brett tend to him. A few weeks ago, she told Brett that she was going to visit her brother and gone to the movies instead. She’d actually intended to go see Ty but once she was in her car, she couldn’t bring herself to spend her hours of freedom wondering what to say into a warm, greasy telephone that spanned the thick glass between them. Then, when she passed the old single-screen Miles City Cinema, she’d just pulled into the lot - a surreal sense of sleepwalking came over her as she bought a ticket and tiptoed up to the very last row.

It was the first times she’d been there since the summer of 1993. Things inside the movie house had not changed so much as faded and dulled, like tuning mistakenly into the standard rather than the high definition channel. The once-gleaming counters now cloudy and streaked with the remnants of cheap, watery cleanser, the maroon carpet now brown with dust and soot.

Coley decided that day that this movie house, more than the bed of the old pickup truck and more than the bedroom of her old apartment in town, had been the scene of the crime. So to speak. After Cam was sent away, Coley endured endless conversations with her mother and Pastor Crawford about how what happened wasn’t her fault, how Cam had corrupted her, how she was the innocent victim of a devious con - someone who need to be banished so that she could be cured and saved. She wanted to believe it. She had listened carefully, took comfort in their certainty and told the same story to Brett, to her friends and, in a letter, to Cam herself. She never wavered out loud. But in her honest moments, which were few at first but more frequent later, she didn’t believe it. Even if she could convince herself that Cam had started it by kissing her out past the rainbow brush at the ranch during Buckinghorse Sale and even if she could believe that Cam had taken it too far on the night they were discovered, she couldn’t square with the movies being all on Cam too. It was not like Coley to skirt her responsibility - she knew she’d played her part. It was like they had both accidentally started a brush fire but then instead of calling for help, just sat there and watched it burn, transfixed by the beauty, the danger or both. 

Memories of that summer had long been cordoned off behind yellow caution tape in her mind but since her afternoon at the movies, they had started to sneak out, unbidden but not totally unwelcome. Under the weight of the depletion of the first months of caring for a newborn, the caution tape stretched, sagged and eventually fell away. During the 4 am feedings, Coley started seeing flashes of Cam - twirling a whistle around her fingers on the guard bench, walking away against the flickering shadows of a bonfire and, perhaps most potently, standing on the altar during her aunt’s wedding in a ridiculous prairie skirt. 

Coley had not seen Cameron since that evening at the Christmas Eve service, when her Aunt Ruth married Ray. She remembered her mother and Ty shepherding her through the crowds with hands on the small of her back, eyes scanning the sea of churchgoers like bodyguards. It was the opposite for Cam, who stood alone and exposed at the front of the church, the impassivity on her face a blatant accusation. Coley had never been more drawn to her. She wanted to go up to the altar, take her hand and lead her somewhere safe, out of view and away from the murmured judgments of the crowd. This impulse had ashamed her at the time. She prayed long and hard about it, saw it as a failure to believe, proof of her impurity and weakness. But looking back on it now, Coley couldn’t think of a more Christian thing to do. 

She managed to make it all the way through the cigarette, one drag after another, as she watched the blurred, hazy shades of dawn sharpen into the focus of a new day. The sky was now a crisp blue, making it hard to see that there would almost surely be thunderstorms later. That the heat would break apart into millions of thick raindrops, that the roads would be closed across the county and that her basement would flood. She did not yet know that there was a water problem in the new house. 

Two days ago, as Coley was clearing up the breakfast dishes, her eyes fell on a name she recognized in the obits of the Miles City Times: Ethel Post. Grandma Post. Her eyes skimmed the text. She learned that Grandma Post had been 92 when she died peacefully in her sleep and that she was remembered by her daughter-in-law Ruth, Ruth’s husband Ray, and her granddaughter Cameron Post of Oakland, CA. She was to be remembered in a service that was open to the public on Friday, May 11 at 11:30 am. That was today. In roughly four hours. 

Coley had been thinking about going. In fact, she had been thinking about almost nothing else. She’d been imagining the church, still dressed in the Easter purples. She pictured the scattered group of mourners, the humble floral arrangements, the glossy faux-wood casket. Mostly, though, she was imagining seeing Cam. Coley couldn’t be sure that she’d be there, of course. Cameron, to her knowledge, had not returned to Miles City since the dawn of the new year after her Aunt’s Christmas nuptials. And over the years, she had taken on a kind of mythical status to those she’s left behind. At first, she’d been a warning for the gay kids. But then, after Promise had nearly collapsed in wake of her escape, the meaning of the Cameron Post cautionary tale started to shift: she’d become a warning not for the gay kids but for those that would try to change them. 

Coley had seen Grandma Post around town a few times since coming back to Miles City about one year earlier. They had spoken only once - just about two months before the obit appeared in the paper. Grandma Post was skulking in the shadows outside of the convenience store across the street from a block of medical offices. Coley had just taken William for his three-month check-up. Grandma Post was licking the melting ice cream exposed between the soggy chocolate cookies of an ice cream sandwich when she recognized Coley walking across the street to her car. They greeted each other warmly. With a little prompting from the older woman, Coley took her through the paces: “He’s 3 months old...Named William after my Dad...He’s a big guy and a good sleeper...Yeah, we’ve been lucky.” Grandma Post cooed and said, “We heard you had married your beau. That’s just wonderful. You always did have a good head on your shoulders - just needed to get it screwed on straight.” Coley was taken aback. In her recollection, no one in town had referred so directly to what had happened between her and Cam. She was sure it was in the forefront of everyone’s mind. It was a relief to know what someone was thinking, rather than parsing side-eyed glances and off-hand comments for hidden meanings, like she normally did. 

A cry emerged through the crackle of the baby monitor. It was hesitant at first and then assertive, breaking the silence and her reverie of a reunion with Cameron that would likely never happen. She would not go to the funeral. Maybe she would take the baby for a walk to the cemetery this afternoon to pay her respects before the rain set in. She gathered her things, making sure to retrieve the evidence of her indulgence, and went inside the house.


End file.
